


Anything but Delicate

by notyouranswer (gorgeouschaos)



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Diego Hargreeves Needs A Hug, Diego Hargreeves is Bad at Feelings, F/M, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, One Shot, Relationship Study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-18
Updated: 2020-04-18
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:28:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23713624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gorgeouschaos/pseuds/notyouranswer
Summary: He fucks up just about everything with Eudora, but he never makes the mistake of thinking her delicate.
Relationships: Diego Hargreeves/Eudora Patch
Comments: 11
Kudos: 53





	Anything but Delicate

**Author's Note:**

> I rewatched the whole show today and here we are.  
> Thanks for reading, hope you like it, and I love hearing from y'all!

He fucks up just about everything with Eudora, but he never makes the mistake of thinking her delicate. Not even the first time he sees her, drowning in an oversized t-shirt and a pair of spandex shorts. 

(If he’d thought she was delicate, he never would have wanted her. Never could have loved her.)

“Hey,” he says, flashing the grin that had every teen magazine declaring him a heartthrob once upon a time. “I’m Diego.”

She eyes him. When he offers his hand, she squeezes it hard. 

“Patch.”

He can’t help himself. “The hell kinda name is that?”

“Better than my first name,” she says without missing a bear, her mouth in a thin line that tells him she’s had this conversation before.

“So, Patch, wanna go out for drinks sometime?”

“Not a chance in Hell.”

Diego’s caught between indignation and amusement, thrown off-guard for the first time in years. He watches her walk away with a level of interest he didn’t know he was still capable of.

It takes three weeks for her to give in and let him buy her a drink.

It takes seven dates for him to learn her first name

(They sleep together on the fifth date.)

Eudora Patch is beautiful and deadly and ridiculously intelligent. She’s a pain in Diego’s ass and she’s the only thing he has left that makes him feel alive. They fight and fuck with the same passion.

She drives him batshit crazy. She’s perfect.

Diego doesn’t talk about his family much, and he sees them even less. Eudora drags him to all of her family’s celebrations, though. The two of them spend three Christmases together, two at her mom’s and one at her dad’s. He meets her brother and cousins and nieces, eats turkey and drinks beer with them. It’s nice in a way Diego never realized family could be.

Eudora doesn’t ask why every report of an OD makes the blood drain from Diego’s face, doesn’t ask why he watches all of his sister’s movies but declines her rare calls, doesn’t comment on how he never misses a shot or loses a game of darts. He tells her everything he knows how to say while his siblings make the headlines and he tries to play by the rules. 

It works, more or less. At least he thinks it does. 

Diego picks Klaus up when someone calls 911 for the drug addict passed out on the riverbank. He pays for Klaus’ rehab even though he knows it’s a lost cause and has been since they were fourteen.

Eudora tries to help him pay. He rips up the check. They fight, and this time it’s not just sparks and irritation. This time it’s _why can’t you ever tell me anything that matters_ versus _why can’t you ever stop pushing._ This time there’s no sweaty, athletic make-up sex, just silence that feels too much like home for Diego to bear.

Klaus checks out of rehab and goes on a bender. Diego goes back to listening for reports of dark-haired junkies on his radio. 

The first time Diego stutters in over a decade is when he tells Eudora he loves her for the first and last time over a conversation and a dinner that have both gone cold. She cries. It’s the first and last time she lets him see her cry.

They don’t have sex, but she falls asleep on his shoulder watching TV, and that’s just as good.

Diego kills someone for pulling a gun on her while they’re on patrol. He doesn’t lose any sleep over it. He’d done worse for less by the time he was twelve. 

The internal investigation finds it was a justified use of lethal force.

Eudora turns her back on him when they get in bed and is gone by the time he wakes up. 

“Tell me you didn’t kill him on instinct, Diego,” Eudora says on the drive to work. He opens his mouth, starts to lie--

\--and stutters.

Eudora slams the door and stalks off without a word once she parks.

Diego doesn’t go back to their place that night. He tracks down Klaus instead.

“Here to drag me back to rehab, brother dearest?” Klaus asks, his eyes and head rolling to look at Diego. “When will you stop trying?”

 _Never,_ Diego thinks. _I don’t know how. I never learned how to stop trying to fix things that are broken._

Out loud, he says, “Does it help?”

Klaus giggles, but his eyes are dead serious. “It makes them go away.”

Diego shoves his hands into his pockets. “Whatdya got?’

It’s the first and last time he does drugs. He calls in sick the next day and throws up for most of it. Eudora either believes him when he says he must have eaten some bad sushi or doesn’t give enough of a damn to call him out on his lie.

Diego sells the ring he’s been carrying in his pocket for a year and uses the money to put Klaus back in rehab. 

He and Eudora still have sex, still pretend everything’s fine, but when Christmas comes, she doesn’t say anything and he doesn’t ask. 

It’s a role reversal Diego doesn’t appreciate.

They don’t break up so much as just… stop. Diego moves his stuff out when he knows she’ll be working-- she made detective before him, of course, she’s always been smarter, _better,_ than he is-- and finds an apartment. 

He gets kicked off the force for excessive violence. No one is really surprised, least of all him. Diego Hargreeves has been a loose cannon and a flight risk since he was seven. Just ask Luther.

It’s freedom like Diego’s never had. He sells his apartment and finds the gym, buys his own knives and starts setting right every wrong the law prevented him from fixing. He gets booked for bigger and bigger fights in the ring, he takes on bigger and bigger threats on the street, and he tells himself he doesn’t miss having someone to come home to, someone to hold him back.

It always feels like the truth until the adrenaline fades.

They run into each other at crime scenes. At first they ignore each other, Diego as capable of giving the silent treatment as her.

(He grew up in Reginald Hargreeves’ house. He’s an expert on silence.)

After a few months, she cracks enough to start giving him death glares. Then she starts talking to him again. Sometimes, she even passes on information. 

When Eudora arrests Diego at the donut shop, he almost has hope that they have a future. That she’s beginning to see things his way. That they can work.

She dies acting like him. 

He lets a murderer go acting like her. 

_Even dead_ , he thinks, limping away from the woman who killed the only person he’s ever loved more than himself, _you’re still driving me insane, Eudora_.

She’d probably tell him not to call her that.


End file.
